Tag Archives: sustainable cooking

I want to share with you two beautiful books that are getting quite a workout in our house at the moment.

But first, please put my absence in the blogosphere for the last month down to a cataclysmic ensemble of new house, new job, new rhythm and a healthy biannual addiction to Buffy*. All pretty reasonable, wouldn’t you say?

Anyhoo, we spent the long weekend (and by ‘we’ I really mean H**) preparing our new veggie garden – the first of what we hope will be many plots scattered around our newly acquired 1/2 acre block. These two delightful books have been particularly inspiring as we continue to learn how to grow our own food.

Kitchen Garden Companion, 2009

Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion is a fantastic book to have up your sleeve if you’re interested in cooking the food you’ve grown. It is a mammoth resource, full of recipes and practical guide to getting your veggie garden off the ground, so to speak. It even includes easy guides to making a worm farm, no-dig garden beds, seasonal planting guides – and how to get kids excited about growing and eating veggies (and all the mums said ‘hallelujah!’). I love this book. I love just flicking through the pages, looking at the beautiful pictures and getting ideas. It’s the first place I look when considering what to plant next, and how to cook what we’ve harvested!

Sustainable Table is a local non-profit organisation formally called Yaboula. The Sustainable Table cookbook includes delicious recipes by chefs, producers, authors, gardeners and everyday people who are interested in environmental issues around food production. It includes simple, yummy recipes (as I type, I have a zucchini slice baking in the oven which I’ve adapted from this book) but The Sustainable Table is much more than a recipe book: it’s a beginners manual to thinking about the environment, sustainability and food. The resource includes a nifty section titled “Hungry for Information” which provides a summary of farming and food production issues as well as practical suggestions for making considered consumer decisions. The book itself is gorgeous. It’s made from recycled paper and filled with testimonies of how each of the contributing authors feel about sustainability, food and the environment.

So, there you have it. Two beautiful books that will change how you think about your food – and, incidentally, make wonderful gifts!

I’d love to hear about any other resources that have challenged & inspired you to think about what you eat and where it comes from.

Shan

*I’m up to season 5 of Buffy and Joyce has just died. Heartbreak! No matter how many times I watch that episode, I still completely lose it.

Hi, I'm Shan. Welcome to my blog, 'Dear Stephen King', a space where I like to chat about some of my favourite things - books, authors, writing, life in all its whimsy and nonsense!
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